Originally Posted by
Hywel Phillips
I use a Hasselblad (H3Dii-31) for stills and now a Scarlet for motion. Both are excellent tools, but the workflow and ergonomics of each are targeted at their specialities. Being able to pull decent stills from a video stream is fine, but it doesn't mean it is the right way to do it for everything. I can well see that if you are shooting motorsport it might be a godsend but for narrative stills like I shoot, it isn't ideal as I need to pick the exact moment to tell the story best. You can make 31 megapixel stop motion movies with the Hasselblad, too, but that doesn't mean it is the best workflow for your project.
As others have said, strobes are still the gold standard for many stills lighting application. I can carry enough light to overpower direct sunlight and do full softbox three point lighting on location... out of a back-pack. And shoot from batteries for hours. Try doing that with HMI!
But it puzzles me that no-one has mentioned the fact that what goes in FRONT of the camera should be different if you shooting stills or moving pictures.
In a single still frame, for example, one often wants to remove visual clutter. The viewer is likely to examine this single image in considerable depth, and their eye is going to have time to complete a journey around the frame. If there's an extraneous plant pot in the foreground partially obscuring the subject, you'd probably remove it.
If you are shooting a dolly shot that plant pot in the foreground should be PLACED be there for a very specific reason- to key the viewer's eye in to the parallax created by the dolly move. What would count as distracting clutter in the still becomes an integral, necessary part of the technique for shooting a moving picture. Instead of having time to rove around the frame, the viewer gets 1/25th of a second, and it is the movement and differences between frames that now catch the eye.
That's a basic example to show that stills and moving pictures have a different visual vocabulary. They are constructed differently.
Also, models are not actors and actors are not models. Although many people can do both with some aplomb, the skills set and performance requirements are simply different.
For stills, my models move from pose to pose as a series of staccato images each designed to capture an elegant moment, and tell the relevant part of the story in a single instant. If you film that on video, it doesn't look like an actor performing a scene from a movie, it looks like a model posing. Likewise, if you get your model to perform as if she was in a movie, you lack the necessary ability to control her pose as you compose shots- you often need to shift position, get down on the floor, climb a ladder, or do any number of similar things to get a good composition for a still, by which time an actor would have finished peforming the scene entirely.
I tell stories with single frame stills and stories with stills sequences (50-ish shots) and stories with moving pictures. The decision as to which of those I'm shooting is the very first one we make, because it informs every production decision thereafter.
Cheers, Hywel
